Payment transactions often involve multiple entities, each of whom have their own criteria for approving or declining a transaction. At the highest level, each entity involved is interested in ensuring that the payer of a transaction has sufficient funds to cover the costs of the transaction. Many entities are also interested in ensuring that a payer or payee is genuine and not fraudulent, such as to provide confidence that the promised funds will be paid for a transaction or that the transacted-for goods or services will be provided. In order to obtain such assurances, many entities, and in particular financial institutions acting on behalf of a payer or payee for a transaction, often utilize a number of services for authenticating entities involved in a payment transaction, as well as the data included in transaction messages themselves.
The use of such services, such as fraud detection services, consumer authentication services, etc., can result in a higher likelihood of detection of fraud and increase the overall chances that an approved transaction will be successfully funded. However, in some cases such systems may result in transactions being declined for technical reasons, even in instances where both the payer and the payee are genuine and interested in successful completion of the transaction. For instance, an acquiring financial institution acting on behalf of a merchant may use a fraud detection model that declines any cross-border transactions involving a consumer from a particular country, even if the consumer is one with whom the acquiring financial institution would normally be comfortable to transact. The declining of such a transaction for technical reasons would thus result in a loss of revenue to the merchant and acquiring institution, as well as a potential loss of the consumer as a recurring customer.
Thus, financial institutions may be interested in identification of instances where a transaction that may be otherwise approved is declined for technical reasons. However, financial institutions lack technical systems that are capable of identifying such instances, because these transactions are being declined by the institutions. In some cases, the technical declines may be occurring at the payment network, with the financial institution never receiving the transaction details for the transaction at all, further prohibiting the institution from identifying such instances. Thus, there is a need for a technical solution whereby a specially configured processing server can identify specially formatted data sets of transaction messages to identify instances of technical declines that may be used for the optimization of performance for acquiring financial institutions.